As someone who plays the drums, I find a percussion-based app like BeatStudio to be particularly entertaining and appealing. The app comes from Frontier Designer, who has also designed and released several other music-creation apps, including iShred, GuitarStudio and PianoStudio.

When you boot up the app, you'll encounter a screen featuring icons of different kinds of drums, symbols and other percussion instruments. You tap on an icon to trigger the sound effect of that instrument. While the main screen doesn't show them all, there are 30 different variants of different percussion instruments. You'll find everything from snare drums to bass drums to high hat symbols to ride symbols and everything in between. The number of instruments here is excellent and allows you to create genuinely impressive soundtracks.

If you're willing to invest the time, you can use BeatStudio as a potentially powerful tool to create your own music. The app features multi-track recording and editing, allowing you to layer different percussion sound effects over one another, eventually blending together your own music.

But it won't come easy. There is a bit of a learning curve to using the app's full-screen editing screen. The app doesn't really explain how it works too well, and you'll have to use trial-by-error to figure out how to use the editing system successfully.

The app also features a bunch of other useful options. For instance, you can import any song from your iPod library and BeatStudio will convert the song, allowing you to listen to a BeatStudio version of the song, showing you how to play it with its instruments. The feature is pretty cool, actually.

BeatStudio offers instant fun for anyone with an interest in percussion. It's easy enough to pick up and play that anyone can enjoy it. Simultaneously, there's enough depth and options here that serious users can do quite a bit with it too.

Review disclosure: note that the product reviewed on this page may have been provided to us by the developer for the purposes of this review. Note that if the developer provides the product or not, this does not impact the review or score.